1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus, an image capturing method, and a program. More particularly, the present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus and an image capturing method for capturing images, and to a program for use with the image capturing apparatus.
2. Related Art
A known optical mask causes the optical transfer function to remain essentially constant within some range from the in-focus position (for example, see Patent Documents 1 and 2). A known camera captures images by focusing optical radiation from an object onto an array with a point spread function (PSF) having an extent greater than twice the pitch of the array at an optimal focus of the objective optics (for example, see Patent Document 3).    [Patent Document 1] U.S. Pat. No. 5,748,371    [Patent Document 2] United States Patent Application Publication No. 2002/0118457    [Patent Document 3] PCT International Publication No. 04/063989
The techniques disclosed in Patent Documents 1 and 2 can increase the focal depth, but require significant restoration processing to be performed on the images. Such restoration processing necessarily involves an enormous amount of calculation, thereby hindering the attempts to improve the real-time characteristics of the image capturing. The camera disclosed in Patent Document 3 can identify defective pixels, for example, but can not achieve a large focal depth when capturing images.